


i've tried cutting the ropes (i let you go but you're still the only one that feels like home)

by falsemurmur



Category: Chuck - Fandom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-18
Updated: 2009-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-04 12:34:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/falsemurmur/pseuds/falsemurmur
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bryce summed it pretty well once (“you were never good at this--saying your feelings part.”), and Bryce had said it as if it was this huge gaping flaw in her character. More than anything, she fears it will be the flaw that will cause Chuck to give up on her.<em></em></p>
            </blockquote>





	i've tried cutting the ropes (i let you go but you're still the only one that feels like home)

**Author's Note:**

> Post 2x22, but no real spoilers.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
**Current music:**| ten days//missy higgins  
---|---  
**Entry tags:**|   
[character-centric: sarah walker](http://community.livejournal.com/wings_for_craft/tag/character-centric:+sarah+walker), [pairing: chuck/sarah](http://community.livejournal.com/wings_for_craft/tag/pairing:+chuck/sarah), [tv: chuck](http://community.livejournal.com/wings_for_craft/tag/tv:+chuck), [type: oneshot](http://community.livejournal.com/wings_for_craft/tag/type:+oneshot)  
  
  
_**i've tried cutting the ropes (i let you go but you're still the only one that feels like home)**_  
**title: **_i've tried cutting the ropes (i let you go but you're still the only one that feels like home)_  
**fandom: **Chuck  
**summary: **Bryce summed it pretty well once (“you were never good at this--saying your feelings part.”), and Bryce had said it as if it was this huge gaping flaw in her character. More than anything, she fears it will be the flaw that will cause Chuck to give up on her._  
_**character(s)/pairing(s): **Sarah, Chuck/Sarah  
**genre:** Angst/Romance  
**rating:** pg-13  
**note:** Post 2x22, but no real spoilers. Dedicated to [](http://mini-miss.livejournal.com/profile)[**mini_miss**](http://mini-miss.livejournal.com/) , because we had a conversation after that Chuck episode that turned my random two paragraph bit on Sarah into an actual fic. That conversation did in fact inspire where the fic went, sweetie, hee. And I know, the episode only just aired last night, but I am a fanfic whore who's muse was inspired. I cannot control that. Now, enjoy.

~*~  
This is going to come across as a surprise, because sure, people who have to dodge bullets on a daily basis are still human at the end of the day (for the most part, anyway). And since humans naturally have fears, however illogical or not, the most formidable of them also have inherent fears. This, however, isn’t the common prediction and hence the surprise: Sarah Walker is afraid of showing her fears.

But that’s not the shocker that’s knocked on her mind for years, it’s not that which has infused her heart with lead the past several months, it’s not what’s turned her skin on fire for weeks, it’s not what’s made her eyes sting with tears the past few days, and it’s not what’s twirled her mind senseless for hours until she finally just took it for what it was. She’s afraid of losing and falling, but it’s too late to cease fire on that, and the fears have been seeping through, but the surprise of it all is that she’s finally okay with Chuck Bartowski seeing this.

Just as life has so often interrupted her progress, though, the words “I want” escape her mouth just as a life or two (neither hers) is endangered. She has no option but to save the day, so she runs.

**

Life-changing moments were like disguises. Slip one fraction of life off, slip another aspect of it on. Each life was a dispensable cover. This wasn’t the case with Chuck. It took her 14 months to come to this definitive conclusion. Not that it was her choice as to whether it was expendable or not. At least not until she made conscious decision to make it her choice.

**

Sweltering summer. August afternoon. Damp day. Tiring Training.

“But I know Kung Fu,” he grunts, earning him a kick in the back from his trainer. From the doorway, he hears a very recognizable chuckle and he smiles. The pain in his spine immediately dissolves, he jumps up to face the door, to gaze at her for the first time since that day he first uttered the words “I know Kung Fu.” Two months.

The trainer mutters something beneath his breath and walks away without so much as acknowledging Agent Walker.

Chuck and Sarah walk toward each other in even steps, soft, small smiles pulling at their lips, until they are toe to toe.

“Hey,” she says, just like she would say when he walked into the Orange Orange.

“Hey,” he says, just the same as if they were not in the middle of a two floor apartment that was more like two closets stuck directly on top of each other on the southwest of Key West, Florida, apartment buildings cluttered around them.

He laughs, and she laughs in turn.

“So what, what are you doing here? Not that I’m not glad to see you, but General Beckman shipped me off for training and sent you--”

“Chuck, I wanted to see you,” she says, cutting him off, saying it before they are crash-landed on or something of the sort.

“Oh,” he says in a short breath. And finally he feels comfortable for the first time in two months. “Oh,” he repeats, this time with a nod and steady breath.

“Yeah,” she nods.

“We should,” he clears his throat, “let’s take a walk.”

She agrees.

*

Her hotel room is the largest room he’s been in, in months. Literally. Always the best for Agent Walker. He had just expected it to be the same for him, since he was a spy now and all that.

“No expense spared, huh?” he muses as he trails his eyes over every corner of her room.

She chuckles and shrugs and heads toward the restroom.

“So why are we here again?” he asks when she’s disappeared into the closet.

“Um,” she says, and she laughs realizing that he cannot hear her from in there. She stands on her tiptoes and reaches for a small case she had thrown up there. She pulls it down, walks out of the closet and heads back over to Chuck.

“Your sister’s been sending us letters, since she thinks we’re on vacation together, but they have all been redirected to me. Thought I’d give them to their rightful owner,” she tells him as she unzips the case and takes out several letters.

Chuck smiles at the sight of them and outstretches his hand to take them, his hand brushing with Sarah’s in the process, and both freeze. Their eyes shoot up to each other, the letters slip from her fingers, his hands don’t attempt to catch them, and then the case falls from Sarah’s hands. Sarah’s hands which shoot to either side of Chuck’s face, and she pulls him to herself, and their lips meet in an anxious kiss.

His hands grip at her waist and he has no control over how they pull at her shirt and how his fingernails prod into the skin of her hips.

“I missed you,” he mutters against her lips, and she responds quickly, “me too” and their mouths stop talking altogether. They just focus on kissing.

She pulls her shirt off and immediately goes to throw off his own shirt, and his belt buckle comes undone in the process as her own jeans are completely gone from one second to the next. They trip over themselves on the way to her bed. Sarah topples on top of him, her arm accidentally jabbing his side, and he bites her lower lip.

He opens his mouth to apologize, but she licks the spot he bit and mirrors the own spot on his lip, skimming her tongue over it, eliciting a small whimper that makes her smirk. Chuck grins and rubs his hand near her belly button, slowly trailing the palm of his hand down to her underwear, Sarah’s breath gradually hardening in the meantime.

She pushes down a hard kiss on his lips, her hands tugging down his pants when he stops his hand movement.

“Wait, wait,” he says reaching into his jeans pocket, and she quirks an eyebrow at him. He blushes the slightest bit before opening his wallet in a quick snap and pulling out a small square wrapper. Sarah smirks, grabs his wallet to chuck it aside, alongside with the pants she finally pulls off of him.

There are no interruptions or impediments this time. He kisses her again.

*

Chuck has more secrets than any other person in the world, what with the Intersect being in his head again and the spy life. Still on top of that, she asks him to keep one more secret: that of what happened in Florida, because in two weeks, he and she will be back from their supposed vacation and if anyone were to find out, she could be taken off his project. And the last thing she wanted was to be taken away from him.

He was ambivalent on the whole thing, because he wanted her, really wanted her, no lies. But there was a half-way point he had to meet, otherwise he wouldn’t have her at all.

This strained their relationship more than either thought it would.

*

She’s opened her mouth to tell him why she is with him and not really with him in the eyes of Casey, General Beckman, and the United States government.

Once she was so close. So close to telling him, but even then her intention wasn’t to tell him everything.

What she wanted to say and was so close to saying was, “I want to protect you, but not as an asset or handler. I want to protect you because you are important, intersect or not, dangerous life, or not. I want to be someone you trust not because you have no other choice, but because you want no other choice. I want a real life, too.”

Since that blistering summer day, her mouth has opened to tell him why it’s worth it to her. Why it’s worth being with him somewhat rather than not at all, but her throat clamps up, she cannot breathe. So she closes up, takes a breath, fixates her eyes on his, and kisses him hard.

Bryce summed it pretty well once (“you were never good at this--saying your feelings part.”), and Bryce had said it as if it was this huge gaping flaw in her character. More than anything, she fears it will be the flaw that will cause Chuck to give up on her.

*

“I love you,” he says, and she does nothing to hide the brimming tears.

“I love you,” he says a second time, his hands reaching for her face, “nothing is going to change that.”

“Chuck, I--I’m hurting you,” she says, words broken like her jagged tears. “I’ve made you keep this secret for seven months. I’m your fake girlfriend. Just fake, and what I’ve been asking of you--”

She stops midway, remembering the seven months, from the moments in Florida to just the night before when she was forced to seduce and kiss a man in front of Chuck, no one the wiser to the piercing of both their hearts.

Chuck pulls her into himself, holds her tight, her tears coming in a rush, and all of this is absolutely wrong.

*

She lets him go because she cannot verbalize everything he means to her, despite him having the capacity to both kiss her and verbalize his feelings. She keeps taking, and he may say it’s fine, but she reads him better than his mirror.

She lets him go before he gets tired.

*

“Bryce said I was never good at talking about my feelings. He was right,” she sighs.

Chuck wraps his fingers tighter around hers, and Sarah closes her eyes. She opens them and flits them back and forth between the sheets covering him and his eyes.

He had gotten out of surgery from the bullet wound in his chest a few hours ago, and those few hours were the worst. She had to stop herself from saying it all before he awoke from the heavy dose of medications he’d been given after the surgery ended. She waited by the bed impatiently until he awoke, and now that he is awake, she has to force the words out of herself.

“No one’s good at talking about their feelings,” Chuck says.

“Maybe not,” she licks her lips, “but at least they manage to say them in some form or another. Unlike me.”

“What are you talking about?” he scoffs. “I know how you feel, Sarah. You don’t have to say it. You’ve saved my life even when it hasn’t been your job. You watch out for my family when the government could care less. You support me when no one believes me. You haven’t slept in over two days because of me. You don’t say it in words, but you do say it in other ways.”

Sarah fights off the droplets forming in her eyes, and a smile plays over her lips. She bites the inside of her cheek, stands from her seat, and leans her body over Chuck’s lying one, her face hovering inches over his.

She rests her head on his forehead, breathes him in, and says in a heady breath, “I love you.”

“Of course you do. I’m Charles Carmichael,” he says smugly.

She slaps his shoulder, and he lets out a loud, “ow! I just had surgery, what do you wanna do, kill me?”

Sarah chuckles, and Chuck laughs in sync with her, and when their laughs die down, he pushes back her hair from her face, brushes his thumb against her cheek, and says, “I love you, too.”

*

The name is irrelevant, but to keep it from becoming unnecessarily complicated, she’ll tell it to you this way: Sarah Walker isn’t a disguise. She was handed a real life (Chuck Bartowski) and she slipped into a comfort zone in which she forget to adopt personas not her own (minus the cover name, of course). It took awhile for her to drop her defenses, but that was a choice she gladly made even when she had the option to run and leave everything behind to start anew. Fact is, she’d already started anew one sunrise on a beach next to a man who wore chucks on seemingly every occasion.


End file.
